The Weight of the World

Associate Professor of Philosophy Kok-Chor Tan examines the intricacies of distributive justice on a global scale.

May 31, 2012

Blake Cole

Bad luck. We’ve all experienced it—the car breakdown on the way to
work; the AC sputtering out on the hottest day of the year. Some bad
luck isn’t as easy to recover from, though, especially when it veers
into the tragic: natural disasters, serious health concerns and
crippling poverty. According to Kok-Chor Tan, Associate Professor of Philosophy,
how a society handles bad luck is at the core of its moral identity and
ability to provide distributive justice. It’s just one model he is
using to help make sense of human rights on an international level.

"There’s no longer a disagreement about basic human rights," says
Tan. "We know this because even the worst war criminals who violate them
deny it. Tyrants don’t say, ‘We’re committing or permitting genocide,
and we don’t care.’ They lie, they say, ‘No, you’re mistaken, there’s no
genocide.’ This denial affirms the presence of a global human rights
culture that even tyrants recognize to have moral weight.”

As a political philosopher, Tan seeks new ways to interpret
societal structures and how they affect the individual. In his new book,
Justice, Institutions, and Luck, he uses a three-prong model
to examine distributive justice. The first, what Tan refers to as the
site question, applies to the rules of society as defined by its
institutions and how they regulate personal conduct, decisions and
day-to-day interaction with people. The second approach, the ground
question, determines how society handles the transfer of resources from
people more well off to those less privileged, and why such a commitment
is pivotal. The final question deals with scope—whether the
application of these principles has global relevance.

Tan’s principle of mitigating bad luck falls under the second
category: the more intimate application of egalitarian justice. ‘It’s
not a commitment that derives from some prior political relationship
with people. It’s about relating to another person as an equal, on moral
grounds,” says Tan. It could be the case that their life should not be
worse off because of a congenital disease, that the rest of us have some
obligation to address this, and at least not let uncontrollable
situations be the sole reason why this person’s life is going less
well.’

This interpersonal obligation also comes in the form of political
rights. Tan argues under a just society, members should not have the
right to impose a social legal order that precludes others who may have
other reasonable world, religious and metaphysical views on life. The
controversy surrounding same-sex marriage would apply here.

"What a person might consider natural is not a sufficient basis for
determining what justice demands. Not so long ago in this country
mixed-raced marriages were deemed disgusting, unnatural, and so on," Tan
says. “In a just society, one individual should not have the right to
impose ideals that preclude others’ pursuits or arrangements based on a
potentially controversial view of what is natural or not natural.”

Controversies surrounding corporations that have a dire effect on
the public—Wall Street’s profit margins have oft been cited during the
99 percent movements—need not be overly complicated, Tan says.
Corporations, like any institution, need regulations that balance
assurance of personal rights and the ability to profit with meeting the
obligations of a just society in regards to mitigating situations like
poverty and sickness. “Corporations are profit-maximizing entities. They
should be left free to do a bit of that. But we need much stricter
rules to regulate this activity. The question is whether the rules they
play by are fair—whether they are reflective of distributive justice.”

In the near future, Tan plans to focus on the ideal of justice
within a corrupt system. "If there has been a violation of justice in
the past, should we talk about reparations? Or, say there was a dictator
who shunned human rights, should the international community respond?
And how do we ensure distributive justice in non-ideal situations?"